BREAKDOWN: How Many People Visit Lake Of The Ozarks Every Year?

School's about to start. The summer vacation season always ends too soon.

And while Lake of the Ozarks is increasingly becoming a year-round, "live-here, work-here, play-here" place, it's still fundamentally a vacation destination, and an extremely popular one. This year the Lake of the Ozarks was voted the Best Lake For Water Sports, and it won Best Recreational Lake In The Nation in 2015.

But how many people actually visit Lake of the Ozarks every year?

No one knows. The Lake's Convention & Visitor Bureau says they don't really have any good ways of measuring it, and traffic studies assembled by developers have their limitations. As a result, estimates vary widely: is it a million a year? The "3 to 5 million" number gets tossed around sometimes. In 2020, one elected official was quoted by national media as saying the Lake was on track to see 9 million visitors that year. (Even by 2020 standards — a breakout year for Lake of the Ozarks — that number seems extremely high.)

One way of approximating the visitor count could be to look at hotel rooms and vacation rentals.

Russell Burdette, who runs the Lake's largest vacation rental management company, Your Lake Vacation, and who is a member of the Tri County Lodging Association (TCLA), broke it down this way...

Based on TCLA membership numbers, the Lake has somewhere around 15,000 rooms available for rent, including VRBOs. Assuming 2 people per room, that would sleep 30,000 people.

Then let's assume another 15,000 rooms to account for friends and family staying with second home owners on any given weekend.

That means the Lake likely could accommodate 60,000 visitors per night. But most people don't come to stay at the Lake for a single night: stays are typically built around a weekend -- often encompassing the better part of a week on one side of the weekend or the other. So that really means the Lake could accommodate about 60,000 visitors per weekend.

Pad that number by 50% to allow for weekday-only visits and other stays that are "off the radar" of the TCLA, and you've got 90,000 visitors per week, at full room capacity. Call it 100,000, just for round numbers.

There are 15 weeks from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But the vacation season has expanded to include most of May (graduation weekend is always a lull, though) and further into September. So let's say there are 20 vacationer weeks, at full room capacity.

100,000 visitors per week x 20 weeks = 2 million visitors per summer.

Of course there's much more to the Lake than the summer! The fall foliage can be utterly stunning and make for excellent autumn outings. The winter brings many second-home owners back for holidays on the waterfront, and to spend a weekend winterizing the Lake home. Both fall and spring see a huge influx of anglers — in October 2022, the twice-a-year Big Bass Bash drew more than 3,600 amateur fishermen to participate in that weekend tournament alone, and there's nothing like wetting a line while the dogwoods and redbuds bloom all around.

Still, May through September probably accounts for at least 75% of the Lake's annual visitors.

So, long story short? Year-round, the Lake probably sees around 2.5 million visitors.

At least, that's one way of figuring it.